I've been playing SC2 since the release. BUNCH of friends of mine migrated over from WoW to Sc2. Kinda shocking...But you know how WoW goes... When an expansion is close people ditch out for a while and come back later.

I haven't hit up an RTS in a while, since Warcraft 2 actually. Damn that was high school I think. Me and 1 of my friends play together pretty often. I've been playing Zerg exclusively just by choice, but I really need to venture out and learn another class. We're having fun, but we're only bronze right now in 2v2. 1v1 I do decent, prolly only around 25-30% wins tho. I can't even fathom how I'm still working towards getting a few units out and then I'm getting hit with stalkers and other shit so fast. I guess I really just need to watch more build vids (Which I've done a ton of) to get a better grasp on a better opening build order. I was doing a roach build and RAPING handfuls of people with that were super inexperienced. But you learn quick that some things don't work with people later on in rank.

Any other people out there been hitting it up? Just curious to know, maybe shoot out some strategies and stuff.

I played starcraft and brood war all the way through a few times, and played a ton of battle-net. But when they took almost an entire decade longer than we expected for sc2 to come out (I believe the original leak was that it would be out in 2002) they kinda lost me and almost all of my friends. It looks awesome, but I don't have time for much of anything, much less video games. Oh well, hopefully they hit enough new gamers to not lose out too much having lost the majority of their original market (except maybe in korea, i bet those guys are still eating it all up)

It's less the thinking and more the repetitive building up of bases, forces, etc... all for like a 2 minute explosion of battle.

Well it all depends what you're into. I'm into a little bit of everything. FPS, RTS, MMO.... I've got a friend that thought the same way as you who just can't get into Starcraft. He has ZERO patience, and can't stand those first 5-10 minutes where he has no idea what the other people are doing. But that's part of the draw to the game. You HAVE to scout and put pressure on your opponents to know what they're doing, know how to counter it... Decide when to attack, when to suck it up and pull back to take fewer losses. It's a completely ridiculously paced game of chess. It's very well balanced game as well. It's got that Rock/paper/scissors mentality, but you can overcome a loss if you know not only your strengths, but also your opponent's weaknesses and exploiting them. If you're getting busted up that quick, it's probably because you didn't scout and put zero pressure on you opponent. I'm finding when I pester someone with zerglings early on and ruin their economy, I can quickly build up stronger forces and plow over them within minutes of me destroying their macro. Smart players learn how to counter this, and put pressure on the others so they can't get to the point of expanding. I'll admit I'm not the greatest at it, and have failed at it many times but I'm trying

I've played slow matches where the guy just turtled up. I've dropped in some roaches in the back of his base and tore up his SCVs, shoving his economy into a dead stop. From there i just bombarded him with attacks from multiple angles while he slowly lost pieces of his split up forces because he couldn't decide where to send em. So I just killed his Macro and picked him apart. Other matches I get rolled on because I held out a little bit and tried to build up more macro, when the other guy went for a small offense and ate me up because I chose the route I chose. But he scouted me and saw it. That's the planning aspect of the game. It can go so many ways. That's my draw to it. Some don't like it, and that's cool. I'll admit it's not for everyone. Especially if you lack patience.

I bought SC2 on Monday but haven't actually played it as neither of my computers is actually capable of running it. My RAM upgrade arrived on Monday and is installed but I need to get a new video card first and since I've been planning to reformat my desktop PC for a while I'm going to do that first. Which means I'm not playing until I stop being lazy and back up everything I plan to save so I can do the reformat.

I'm kinda shocked with my setup. I run a 24" Widescreen HD and a 22" off an Nvidia 8800, I've been running WoW and other games on it for a few years. With Starcraft it's telling me that my processor is lacking and slows down at some points. I thought most of the ooomph would needed to be in the video but apparently it's time to look into building a new PC with some more processing power.

If I don't get it for my birthday here in a few weeks, I'm definitely buying it. Been waiting 10 years for this dang game to come out! I still play the use map setting games on the original SC game at least once a week. I'm assuming that option is still there on bnet multiplayer for SC2 right?

What do you mean "use map settings?" You talking about custom games? They have custom games and a map editor. I havent' seen or messed with the map editor yet tho, but I've read that it's in there. I needa find it because me and a friend have been doing a lot of 2v2 and we like to turtle up for fun. THe other night we were in a ranked match and we WHORED up some spine crawlers and turrets and held off two guys for an hour and a half.

Yeah, use map settings games were custom games. Playing multi or single player on your own map you could add items you could interact with, start with units or bases ect. I had even built a 12 stage campaign in the map editor, it didn't play too bad. And then did a co-opp campaign that had 4 stages. I miss that old game. . . Now I have to open my case, and plug in my old HD to my shitty older motherboard to even play (My motherboard never liked dual booting)